Huston Smith
Huston Smith
Huston Cummings Smithis a religious studies scholar in the United States. His book The World's Religionshas sold over two million copies and remains a popular introduction to comparative religion...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTheologian
Date of Birth31 May 1919
CountryUnited States of America
people world window
...primal people see the objects of this world not (or not only) as solid but as open windows to their divine source.
religious joy promise
At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome.
god creative interchange
God enters our lives when through our creative interchanges we make history more just.
energy atoms sun
It remained for the twentieth century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, however, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine-the imago dei-image of God, it is sometimes called. And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case love's bombardment
differences unity blind
Beware of the differences that blind us to the unity that binds us.
moving love-is self
Love is the movement within life that carries us, that enables us, that causes us to break out of what Alan Watts calls the “skin-encapsulated ego.” Without love, we are self-centered, but love enables us to move the center of our lives outside our ego. Therefore it expands our lives and, needless to say, enriches it. Any human being would give anything to love or be loved. When it really happens, it is like heaven on earth.
spiritual thinking civilization
I'm not a chauvinist. I'm a universalist. I think that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in those civilizations.
isms schism ends
All -isms end up in schisms.
jesus confined defined
God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus.
joy fullness destroyed
We all carry it within us: supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed.
race world endure
If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.
powerful example moral
The most powerful moral influence is example.
our-actions action consequences-of-our-actions
...the only thing that continues is the consequences of our action.
islands together realization
In mysteries what we know, and our realization of what we do not know, proceed together; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. It is like the quantum world, where the more we understand its formalism, the stranger that world becomes.